Axe of Ahneby

DESY, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, is a national accelerator research center in Germany. I was reading a recent issue of their magazine, femto, since there were articles about supersymmetry and grand unified theories. However, those articles were really pretty boring (there's nothing much that you can say about theoretical research programs that have not accomplished anything), and my eye caught a short article near the back about the Axe of Ahneby.

Ahneby is a town in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein in the north, tucked between the Elbe river (and Hamburg) and Denmark. Several Bronze Age axes were found near this town in the 19th century, and recently, using the X-rays from one of their accelerators, DESY scientists showed that one of these axes was a fake! One of the real axes is the 4000-year-old Axe of Ahneby.

Axe of Ahneby

One of DESY's first papers, here, shows the different diffraction patterns resulting from the real axe and from a reproduction. And here is another short paper, explaining the differences.

Finally, here is a news story about the incident.